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Welcome to r/technology

Vision

/r/technology is a subreddit dedicated to the discussion of all things technology. This subreddit is for technology-related submissions only, but we allow articles which are of a political nature provided they are also significantly related to technology.

Definition

Technology is the making, modification, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems, and methods of organization, in order to solve a problem, improve a pre-existing solution to a problem, achieve a goal, handle an applied input/output relation or perform a specific function. (Wikipedia)*

Rules

1. Allowed Submissions

Submissions must be a technology related article or self post.

Self posts must contribute to /r/technology and foster reasonable discussion.

2. Follow the Rules of Reddit

3. Titles

Link submissions should use the article's title or a quote describing its content. They must be free of personal opinion and accurately represent the content of the article. Posts that fail to meet these criteria may be removed at moderator discretion.

4. No Image or Video Submissions

This does not include articles with supporting videos.

5. No Mobile Sites

These URLs are usually prepended with "m." or "mobile." Please link to the desktop versions of sites instead.

6. No Personal Information

No personal information or Facebook links.

7. No Petitions or Surveys

Also no crowdfunding submissions.

Transparency

Reforms

The moderators of this subreddit are dedicated to transparency and building trust with the community. /r/technology is currently undergoing reform to increase moderator transparency and openness. Currently implemented reforms:

Yeah. The advantage in negotiations last time around was firmly with Republicans, who cornered the serious position on balancing the budget in the media and on the hill. The composition of congress is for all intents and purposes nearly identical. The President agreed to a ratio of cuts to revenues of 20:1. But let's remember, he's "not serious" about the deficit. If you think we're a few months from being Finland, you're pretty misguided, bro.

I'm misguided because I think I should be able to keep more of my earned money? I look at the waste and there is no reason for it... We just give money away to other countries that hate us. It's cool though, just raise taxes. You guys have got this under control.

The problem is, policies were put in place over the past decade that did not get paid for, and as a result have made the national debt far larger. We're to the point where interest on that debt is a significant chunk of the yearly deficit, and it only grows larger each year.

The 2001 & 2003 tax cuts reduced tax revenues substantially, and yet instead of trimming spending to compensate we got expansions to Medicare (parts C & D) without a funding mechanism, a decade of war in two countries and a financial industry bailout.

Frankly, if one tries to take tax increases off the table, the only options to reach the surplus that is ultimately needed are large cuts to defense spending, medicare/medicaid and social security. By themselves they make up +70% of yearly spending.

Reform and eliminating "waste" is great, but remember the uproar about "Obama cutting ~700 billion"? That was just reducing the growth rate of spending over 10 years, we need to save +1000 billion every single year just to break even.

Without raising tax revenues, even eliminating 100% of all non-defense & non-medicare/SS spending would not quite be enough to overcome the current +1 trillion surplus.